Welcome! I am writing this post from home in Minneapolis, a 100-pound Weimaraner (Rodney) and a large pile of gear sprawled beside my desk. It's late March in Minnesota, the long winter clearing up, dirt and dead leaves running with rainwater in the roads. My bike shoes, muddy from a long ride today, are on the floor. Maps are taped on the wall, and a Nepalese man stares up at me from the cover of a Lonely Planet guidebook, his crazed eyes looking out at a valley in the Himalayan Mountain Range.

I have just returned from South America, where I raced in a weeklong event, the Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race. That was February 9 to 17. Now, next week I leave for Nepal, a trek to Mount Everest Base Camp taking up my calendar for three weeks in April. This is my life. Each year, I travel, race, explore, and test gear -- and then I come home to write about it in my syndicated newspaper column ("The Gear Junkie"), for magazines like Outside and Travel+Leisure, and online at www.GearJunkie.com, a site I created in 2006 to cover adventure and gear.

With this blog, I hope to expand on the material found on GearJunkie.com and do something a bit different. This page, a personal adventure journal and gear-review source, will see updates each week with news from my travels, competition reports, gear-review field tests, and info on news and events in the greater world outdoors.

Stayed tuned for a dissection of the Wenger Patagonian Race later this week. And then follow me to Nepal, where I will add updates live from the trek to Mount Everest. Just pray my sat phone connection works in the Khumbu region and my laptop doesn't fall off a yak.

Checking out for now,

--Stephen Regenold

"The Gear Junkie"

03/22/10